Russell Golman

Assistant Professor

Bio

My current research projects have me thinking about how firms learn and innovate, how ants and bees make decisions, how people communicate by giving, how fads emerge, how uncertainty may be exciting or uncomfortable, and how curiosity arises. The common thread is my focus on the behavioral side of game theory and decision theory, my belief that we can explain choices by acknowledging that individual agents may learn or make mistakes and may have motivations beyond their material payoffs. My interdisciplinary training in mathematical methods applied to the social and behavioral sciences underlies my efforts to model informational preferences, prosocial preferences, learning and boundedly rational behavior. For example, I have used nonlinear differential equations to model adaptive learning in games and incorporated random noise variables to generate strategic choice errors. Key to my approach here is incorporating heterogeneity and thus taking seriously the fact that people learn or err at different rates and in different ways. I have also used optimization theory to offer an explanation of perverse patterns of behavior in a variety of contexts, from distorting performance evaluations to avoiding the doctor. A core insight here is that while such behaviors are indeed counterproductive or even harmful, they may nevertheless be the result of utility maximization. I have used Poisson branching processes to generate positive feedbacks, which appear as firms innovate or as social insects search and recruit.